[eduptultyt]

nice breakdown, jim.

my instincts have long indicated that music only becomes negative once it comes under corporate control. we need only look as far as what a lifetime of corporate music has done to britney spears for evidence of this. by their fruits ye shall know them and all that hoohah.
:-)

rap, i think, is no more inherently negative or positive than the rest of it. but when you have a situation where money is being pumped into the image machine to popularize artists and songs whose message is (and quite a lot, but not all, of rap today seems to be running this message) "being poor, ignorant, and violent are good things and will make you popular," then i believe we are dealing with what is a very negative influence, and it often scares me that more people don't recognize it as such.

pop, and this is the main reason i couldn't stand the music in the late eighties and early nineties, is no less sinister in that all the songs revolve around second-chakra issues: love and relationships, desire, rejection, fulfillment and betrayal. it keeps listeners focused at a very low level of psycho-energetic development by consistently portraying what the svadhisthana chakra represents as the pinnacle of human interaction.

violent rap moves into third-chakra issues of externalized anger and control, though to tell you the truth, i don't which one is more destructive. at least rap, understood thus, represents energetic progress.

but i do like quite a lot of rap and r&b. you have to be ready to analyze, then pick and choose what you will let into your brain on a regular basis.